53% drop in homicides - to 45 - sets a record

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, December 30, 2009

No one can quite account for it, but San Francisco is poised in 2009 to have the biggest one-year drop in homicides on record.

The Police Department has logged 45 homicides in the city this year - a decline in lethal shootings, stabbings and bludgeonings of more than 50 percent from both 2007 and 2008, when the city recorded 98 and 97 homicides, respectively. If it holds through the rest of the year, it will mark the lowest number of homicides since 1961, when there were 39.

"This is a remarkable reduction," Mayor Gavin Newsom said Tuesday. "It's the lowest it's been in nearly half a century."

As homicides plummeted, the Police Department's expanded homicide unit caught up on its work. The newly expanded unit solved roughly 70 percent of killings in 2009, about twice the rates of both 2007 and 2008 and the Police Department's best figure in memory.

In some recent years, when the homicide total edged close to 100, the department solved as few as 25 percent of the killings.

Police say this year's improved arrest rate is due to the overall homicide drop - it's easier to solve crimes when there aren't as many of them - but also to a decline in cases that are especially stubborn to unravel, such as gang- or drug-related killings with few or no witnesses.

Ethnic homicides

In recent years, most victims of such crimes have been blacks and Latinos. The number of African American men slain in the city this year plunged to 22, from 44 last year and 47 in 2007. Eight Latino men were slain in 2009, compared with 24 in 2008 and 23 the year before that.

Chief George Gascón said he believes some of the decline, particularly the drop in slayings of African Americans, is attributable to the Police Department's decision to target areas of gang activity in Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley and the Western Addition for tougher enforcement.

The zone enforcement strategy deploys officers to hot spots and targets offenders thought to be likely to commit more crimes.

"I believe that strategy - and the placement of gang enforcement officers in gang areas after homicides - has reduced the retaliations that typically follow shootings," Gascón said. "The targeted approach has had a very positive impact."

A similar police strategy in the Mission, coupled with increased foot patrols and a federal crackdown in late 2008 on the MS-13 gang, is thought to have contributed to a sharp drop in gang-related killings in that neighborhood.

Oakland has the most homicides of Bay Area cities with 109, compared with 123 in 2008. Richmond has recorded 47 homicides this year, and San Jose, the Bay Area's largest city, has had 26.

Many U.S. cities are seeing drops in homicides. FBI numbers for the first half of 2009 showed a 10 percent drop nationwide. In New York City, for example, there had been 461 slayings as of Sunday - the lowest number since reliable record keeping began in 1963, according to the New York Times.

In San Francisco, it isn't just homicides that are down. The number of shootings, fatal and nonfatal, plunged about 40 percent this year from 2007, when there were 239 instances of gunfire causing injury. Through late December, the total in 2009 was 142.

Homicide unit expands

But Gascón, who came on the job in late July, acknowledged that he has not had the time to analyze the numbers closely, and said some crime data are still being compiled.

"The department is extremely deficient in classifying crimes, reporting crimes," he said. "The good news is, unquestionably, homicides are down significantly from a year ago. Forty more people would not be alive today if we hadn't improved it."

A change that police credit with leading to more arrests was the expansion in March of the homicide unit from about a dozen investigators to 30 full-time detectives. That has allowed the department to team four investigators on homicides instead of the historic reliance on two.

Lt. Mike Stasko, head of the homicide unit, said that typically in the four-investigator model, one investigator is in charge of the crime scene, another studies the victim's background and reviews video or other records related to the crime, and the other two investigators conduct interviews in the field.

"It's been more successful this way because the workload is shared," Stasko said. "We cover more ground and we have better knowledge, sooner, of the entire incident."

Some people outside the department wonder whether the success will hold.

Damone Hale, an activist in the Bayview as well as a defense attorney, said the police crackdown on neighborhood gangs and drug dealers cannot work for long unless the city follows up with programs to give young people work or something to do.

"These kids are still engaged in lethal violence," Hale said. "Suppression is not enough. It's OK that we have a reduction, but the cause is still there."

Decline unexplained

Another longtime activist in the Bayview, Marie Harrison, said none of the explanations for the decline in homicides completely adds up.

She said parents are doing more to counter violence, and community attitudes appear to be changing in favor of resolving conflicts short of bloodshed.

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